


is it that we are dying?

by NeverNooitNiet



Category: Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Bubonic Plague, Existential Dread, Historical Inaccuracy, How Do I Tag This, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Temporary Character Death, black death, major character discorporation, probably, the fourteenth century
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-24
Updated: 2018-12-24
Packaged: 2019-09-26 04:41:34
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,045
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17135138
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NeverNooitNiet/pseuds/NeverNooitNiet
Summary: “Why don’t you just heal yourself, then?” Aziraphale asked. The demon looked about an inch away from discorporation.Crowley struggled to push himself into an upright position, thin frame wracked with another burst of coughing as he did so. When he finally recovered enough control to look up at the angel, there were flecks of blood on his lips.“Well, I would have done,” he said, rather petulantly, “only some bloody bastard had to go and bless me, didn’t he?"England, 1349, the middle of the 14th century. The black death rages, and Aziraphale has to help a dying demon escape from a church.





	is it that we are dying?

Aziraphale leaned against the cool stone wall of the church, and tried desperately to get the stench of death out of his nose.

England, 1349. The middle of the fourteenth century, two years since the plague had first broken out in Europe, and Aziraphale was _tired_. Tired of death and blood and broken bodies and being quite unable to do a thing to help. Being an angel sounded all lovely and ethereal, but at times like this, it was more infuriating than anything else.

He was not, strictly speaking, allowed to  heal anyone other than himself. Ineffability, and all that. He just had to watch, and this was how Aziraphale knew, with an uncomfortable sort of self-awareness, that he was a terrible, terrible angel. Because after two years, Aziraphale was _furious_. Furious at all the suffering and misery that was happening for seemingly no good reason— no, scratch that, for _no reason at all_ — and at the fact that he just had to watch it all, and do nothing. It had been two achingly long years that, for Aziraphale, would always carry the sound of screaming children, the crackle of funeral pyres, and of other sorts of pyres entirely.

Aziraphale wondered vaguely where Crowley was.

The demon had been in Italy, the last Aziraphale had heard of him, which was, of course, the place where all this business had kicked off, in Europe anyway, back in 1347. Aziraphale thought he ought to be concerned about that, though for the sake of Crowley or the Italians, he couldn’t be certain.

Oh, he and Crowley had their little... arrangement, now, and they probably got on better than their respective superiors would like, but that was _convenience_ , more than anything. It had been over five thousand years now. You couldn’t go round madly trying to discorporate each other for five thousand years, you’d never get anything done. If one looked at it like that, really Above ought to be in favour of the Arrangement. His thwarting rates had been up, actually, since it had come into being in roughly 800 AD. Not that Heaven would see it like that. Gabriel would have a fit, for one.

Aziraphale sighed, and dragged himself back to the present day. Arrangement or not, Crowley was still a demon. And he was still an angel. Aziraphale strongly suspected that Crowley might have had something to do with the whole plague situation, and the thought upset— or enraged— him more than he cared to admit.

Well. Ineffability or not, Aziraphale couldn’t just— just sit around and watch everyone around him drop like flies, and so he’d done all he could— found a small parish church in the north somewhere, one of the few places in England with any genuine holiness left to it, where priests and monks still tried to help the sick, rather than to barricade them out.

Father Godfrey, who was the acting head of the little church, what with all the deaths that had plagued them, was a young, rather uncertain man, heavily shaken by the loss of so many of his brothers, but he worked tirelessly with Aziraphale to help as many of the city’s afflicted inhabitants as possible, giving them refuge and warm food, and trying to ease their passing. It was thankless work, and hard, and the church stank of blood and sweat and human waste, but Aziraphale thought that the young priest felt the same way he did— that if they didn’t live this harsh, miserable life, trying to help others, they wouldn’t be able to live with themselves at all.

Aziraphale got up, and began to make his rounds of the church, to take stock of the dead and the dying, marking the black fingernails, the strange, ugly swellings that seemed to force their way out of the skin, and shuddered slightly. You never got used to human misery, not even after over five thousand years of it.

In a corner of the church lay a young man, face pale and drawn, nails grave-black, purple marks clawing their way up his arms, black hair plastered with fever to his pallid forehead. Aziraphale didn’t recognise him— he must only have arrived that morning. The man was very thin, and eerily still, and Aziraphale thought, with a dread rush of nausea, that he might already be dead. Aziraphale knelt down next to the man, gently gave his shoulder a shake.

“Sir. Can you hear me? Please wake up. _Sir_.”

_What a waste_ , thought Aziraphale. _What a miserable waste of a life, to die like this, without me ever even knowing his name, to get tossed into a pit like— like some sort of_ thing _, rather than a person, for no-one to know who he was, what happened to him. What a useless bloody waste._

The man gasped suddenly, arched forwards, coughing violently, and gazed up at Aziraphale with slitted yellow eyes.

The angel practically jumped up to his feet, gazing down at the demon with no small amount of horror in his own, perfectly ordinary eyes.

“ _Crowley_? How on _Earth_ — what are you doing here? What are you up to?”

Crowley glared up at him, snakelike eyes huge and oddly bright in his gaunt face.

“What am _I_ — I’m only dying of the bloody plague, angel. What does it _look_ like?”

Aziraphale continued to stare fixedly at Crowley, not quite able to believe this.

“Why don’t you just heal yourself, then?” Aziraphale asked. The demon looked about an inch away from discorporation.

Crowley struggled to push himself into an upright position, thin frame wracked with another burst of coughing as he did so. When he finally recovered enough control to look up at the angel, there were flecks of blood on his lips.

“Well, I would have done,” he said, rather petulantly, “only some bloody bastard had to go and _bless_ me, didn’t he? And then put me in here. And now...” Crowley’s face contorted into a rictus mockery of a smile. “It’s a race to see what’ll kill me first. The disease, or the holiness.”

Aziraphale sat down next to Crowley, still remarkably displeased by the whole situation, but unwilling, somehow, for the rest of his little congregation of the dying to notice what was going on.

“That would have been Father Godfrey,” said Aziraphale, voice low so that it wouldn’t carry. “He’s a good man.”

“I rather noticed, thanks,” said Crowley gruffly. He wiped the blood off his mouth. “This’ll be it for me for a while, I reckon, angel. I’ve already been burnt at the stake about three times already this century, and Below’s getting all tetchy about all the bodies I’m going through. I doubt I’ll be back until at least the fifteenth century, the way Beelzebub kept carrying on last time.”

Aziraphale nodded rather glumly. This century was miserable enough as it was, but Crowley was the only other being on the planet who understood, at least to some extent, what Aziraphale felt like, what it was to watch civilisations crumble before your eyes, and do nothing, what it was like to watch everyone you knew grow old and die, or worse still, _not_ grow old, and die anyway. Even if Crowley hadn’t been around for the last three years, the knowledge that he was out there somewhere, that he was going through the same thing that Aziraphale was, had been immensely comforting, somehow. It would be a long, bitter fifty years or so without him.

And the seeds of an immensely stupid idea began to take hold in the depths of Aziraphale’s mind. He pushed it down for now, stared critically at Crowley, the grotesque swelling that protruded from his neck, purple-black and angry, at the areas under the dark wool of Crowley’s tunic where he knew there must be more of them. No, the demon really didn’t have long left, not at this rate. Aziraphale sighed.

“Well, it’s fitting in a way, I suppose. Divine punishment and everything.”

Crowley gaped at him.

“Are you trying to imply that— that all of this is somehow _my fault_?”

Aziraphale folded his arms across his chest defensively, and raised an eyebrow.

“My dear boy, I’m well aware you were in Italy when it all started. And you are a demon, you know. It wasn’t _too_ difficult to puzzle out.”

Crowley bristled, or tried to. The effect was more sad than threatening.

“You— you really _think_ —” Crowley broke off into another coughing fit, worse this time, his whole body shaking. By the time he finally managed to break it off, with a slick, gurgling sound, the hand he’d used to cover his mouth was damp with blood, and Crowley absently wiped it clean on the church stones and stared at Aziraphale with something like _hurt_ in his yellow eyes. “Do you really think I could do all of this? Kill all of these people?” Crowley’s voice was small, and hoarse from coughing, and Aziraphale felt a small twinge of something inside him.

“Well, did you?” he asked brusquely, pushing it aside.

Crowley dug his ravaged fingernails into his palms and gave Aziraphale a flat look of bleak incredulity.

“Bless it all to _Heaven_ , angel, do I blame you for the building of every blessed church in Europe? Look, it was definitely my side, probably even Pestilence himself, I heard he was round in China somewhere. But it wasn’t me. All of this— I would _never_ —” and Crowley abruptly turned his head away from Aziraphale, and retched violently. There was a worrying amount of red in the small puddle of sick, and the stupid idea that had occurred to Aziraphale earlier came back, in full force. Crowley shuddered for a moment, then seemed to regain his composure, and continued.  
“Besides, have you seen what your side is up to? The flagellants, starving and whipping themselves, all in the name of G— you know. It makes me _sick_. Not that He’s actually going to pay them any attention, of course. They’re just...spreading it from place to place. And— and all the priests and monks who’ve just barricaded themselves in churches, Hell, the blessed Pope who’s barricaded himself inside a church, and the persecutions, and the _burnings_ , and the hatred, and—” Crowley’s eyes blazed. “And you blame _me_?”

Aziraphale looked down at the floor for a second, the wide grey stones. Crowley always had a way of doing this, of somehow taking Aziraphale’s innermost doubts and fears and laying them out as though they were common sense, simple points in a debate. Aziraphale could never decide whether he liked it or not.

“Look— Crowley— I’m sorry, all right? I know you didn’t really— look, if I got you out of here, do you suppose that would help?”

Crowley looked at him doubtfully.

“It— might. But angel...” Crowley looked up at him with those wide eyes, and Aziraphale realised, for the first time, that the demon was actually _scared_. “I— look, I don’t know if I can _walk_.”  
Aziraphale rolled up the sleeves of his robe, and cast one last, nervous look around the church, to be certain that Father Godfrey hadn’t returned.

“That’s all right, my dear. I’ll help you. Come on.” Aziraphale bent down, stretched out a hand, and reached to help pull Crowley to his feet. This proved rather easier than expected— Crowley was eerily light, and it took next to no force to get him upright. Once standing, eyes slightly glassy, Crowley only managed to hold his balance for a few seconds, and then teetered forwards, into Aziraphale’s waiting arms. Crowley let out a small, pained noise, and Aziraphale winced, and, as gently as he could, draped one of Crowley’s arms around his own, significantly broader shoulders, so that the demon could either walk along, using Aziraphale for support, or simply let himself be dragged. A few of the other, more lucid plague victims in the church looked up at what was going on with mild interest, but no-one voiced anything. The effort of getting to his feet seemed to have taken quite a bit out of Crowley, and the demon’s eyes began to droop closed. Aziraphale’s heart lurched, unsure if they’d open again.

“Where have you _been_ , anyway?” Aziraphale asked, slightly shrilly, trying to keep Crowley  awake, here with him, for as long as possible.

“Hmmm?” asked Crowley vaguely. The question seemed to take a moment to register. “Oh. I was in Italy. Rome. Thought you knew.”  
Aziraphale gently began to move the two of them towards the heavy wooden doors of the church.

“I mean, I was vaguely aware, but what were you _doing_ there, if not starting the plague?”

Crowley gave a weak sort of twitch that might have been intended as a shrug.

“Well, once the plague had arrived, there were all these people who figured that if they were going to die, anyway, they might as well have a good time with it, you know, drinking and feasting and... all sorts of other things you most certainly wouldn’t approve of. It was quite good fun, for a while, only the problem was, they were _right_ , you see.” Crowley was quiet for such a long time that Aziraphale was afraid he might have passed out, or something of the sort, until the demon sighed, and added, with the most quietly serious tone Aziraphale had ever heard him use, “they all died. And then I was alone, and suddenly there wasn’t very much point in staying in Italy any more.” They had to turn, ever so slightly, to get past a pew, Aziraphale feeling the demon’s fragile body knock against his slightly, and Crowley whimpered softly, but continued, as though he was desperate to get the words out. “And ssso I thought, who’sss the one persson I know who can’t die of the bloody plague, my good friend Assss— _Aziraphale_ , and the rest, I sssuppossse, is hissstory.” Crowley’s hiss, always present as a slight undertone most humans just took for a mild lisp, suddenly became far more pronounced, and this more than anything scared Aziraphale, the idea that Crowley was losing his grip on his corporation.

“We’re almost there now, dear,” he said, as soothingly as possible. “Just a few more steps, and you’re not even really the one taking them. Come on, now...”

“Brother Ezra?” came a gentle voice behind him, and it took a truly ineffable amount of willpower for Aziraphale to avoid saying something utterly inappropriate for a church, or for anywhere, really, if one happened to be an angel.

“Father Godfrey!” Aziraphale replied, trying his best not to sound overly suspicious. _Oh yes, hello, good day, Father, don’t mind me, I’m just smuggling a demon out of your church_. Aziraphale risked a glance down at Crowley, who had at least had the good sense to screw his eyes shut as the priest neared, to avoid him seeing them, the way he was slumped against Aziraphale for support, and had yet another awful idea. “I— I am afraid this young man has died,” said Aziraphale, and he felt Crowley against him, carefully slowing his breathing as much as he thought he could risk, subtly going slightly limper in places. Father Godfrey’s face fell.

“Oh— why, I only brought him in this morning. I had hoped...” the Father trailed off dejectedly, and Aziraphale looked at the lines around his eyes that belonged in the face of a much older man than he was. “But, my brother, where are you taking him? Surely it is wiser to wait for the body cart to come?”

Aziraphale swallowed nervously. Now he had to lie well, and lie quickly, two things he did not at all enjoy doing. Still, the ends justified the means, he supposed.

“I— well, I knew him personally, you see, and I just wanted...” Aziraphale trailed off, but Father Godfrey patted him on the back as though he understood.

“Of course. What was his name? I should like to add him to my prayers.”

Aziraphale tensed up so much that he almost dropped Crowley. He couldn’t just say _Crowley_ , could he? It was hardly a usual name, and even if it had been, Crowley was only in this state because of the Father’s blessing, well-intentioned though it might have been. He hated to think what regular prayers might do to the poor demon. Crowley typically employed a modern first name, he was vaguely aware, but as Aziraphale never made use of it, he couldn’t for the life of him remember what it was.

“Er— that is to say— Gilbert.” It was the first name that had popped into his head, and Aziraphale already regretted it.

Father Godfrey nodded solemnly.

“Well, I will pray for poor Gilbert to find salvation in the next life.” And with that, the priest walked off, leaving Aziraphale to drag Crowley, who was still doing an eerily accurate impression of a corpse, the last few steps out of the church.

The second Aziraphale reckoned they were out of sight of Father Godfrey, he gave the demon a slight shake.

“Crowley. It’s all right now, you’re out of there, come on...”

Nothing happened. Crowley stayed still, unmoving, slumped against Aziraphale’s shoulder.

“Crowley. My dear. Wake _up_.”

There was still no response, and Aziraphale looked at Crowley, really properly looked, at the black fingernails and the dark shadows under his skin that looked like bruises but weren’t anything so benign and the boils and the fresh blood and vomit flecking his lips, and how terribly small and pale and light he was, and he was quietly afraid.

“Crowley,” Aziraphale tried again, “I just lied to a priest. I just had to drag you all that way out of a church. If you’ve now gone and died on me, you’d better _hope_ Below keeps you for a while, or I’ll send you back downstairs myself, you useless bloody _serpent_.” Aziraphale was barley aware of how loud his voice had gotten, until he felt it crack on the final word.

But oh, miracle of miracles, he felt Crowley twitch ever so slightly in his arms, and he saw his golden eyes flutter open, just a crack.

“ _Gilbert_?” Crowley forced out, voice hoarse and incredulous, and it was the most beautiful noise Aziraphale had ever heard. Aziraphale felt his face crack into a smile. "Do I _look_ like a bloody Gilbert to you?"

“I’m terribly sorry, would you rather I’d just gone ‘oh, yes, this is my demon friend, don’t mind us’, and seen if he’d let us continue on our merry way?”

“S’pose not,” said Crowley weakly, “but Gilbert?”

Aziraphale peered down at him worriedly.

“Crowley,” he asked hesitantly, “do— do you feel any better? Do you think you could heal yourself?”

Crowley concentrated for a moment. Then:

“Nuh,” he forced out eventually. “Sorry, angel.”

Aziraphale felt his heart sink slightly, the prospect of fifty Crowley-less years suddenly threateningly real.

“That’s all right, dear,” he said shakily. “Look, we’ll just— just get you out of sight of the church, and then I can put you down— I know there’s not a lot of you, but _still_...”

Aziraphale dragged Crowley over to the small patch of forest that bordered the church, but was hopefully thick enough to hide them from Father Godfrey. He gently set Crowley down so that the demon was sat leaning against a tree, wincing at the blood-splattered fit of coughing this provoked, and then came and sat down next to him. Crowley shifted slightly, despite the twinge of pain that crossed his pale face at this, so that he was once again leaning against Aziraphale.

They sat like that for a while, in silence, Aziraphale looking over at Crowley every few seconds, just in case, and pretending he wasn’t.

“I’ll miss you, you know,” said Crowley softly after a while, and Aziraphale closed his eyes for a second to steady himself.

“Well,” he managed after a while, “What’s fifty years in over five thousand?” There was another beat of silence, and Aziraphale looked at how the afternoon light caught on Crowley’s eyes, illuminated dappled sections of burnished gold, contrasted with softest yellow, warm and beautiful and strange and utterly, utterly Crowley.  
“I’ll miss you too,” he added, finally, and it felt oddly like a confession. Crowley managed a wan smile, and Aziraphale decided that he really couldn’t cope with this sober, and pulled a small bottle out of his robes. Crowley perked up immediately at the sight of it.

“It’s communion wine,” Aziraphale said, as a warning of sorts. “Is that too holy for you, do you reckon, or do you think you’ll be all right?”

Crowley sighed.

“Ah, what difference does it make? ‘M dying anyway. I’d rather not do it sober, if it’s all the same to you.”

Aziraphale wordlessly handed the bottle to Crowley, who took it in two slightly shaky hands, and took a generous swig, before passing it back to Aziraphale. Back and forth they went, a routine they’d perfected over the centuries, swapping drink after drink. The bottle stayed full for far longer than it really had any right to, filling Aziraphale with a pleasant warmth, and if Crowley kept breaking into longer, more violent coughing fits, Aziraphale pretended not to notice, even as Crowley’s skin, pressed against his, turned clammy, even as the demon started to shiver, even as afternoon began to turn into night. Aziraphale did his level best to ignore it all, and just— kept talking, useless things, silly anecdotes from their shared pasts, trying somehow, to keep Crowley anchored to him, but the demon got quieter and quieter as the day dragged on, coughs reverberating through his small frame, until every breath came as a laboured gurgle. Aziraphale didn’t mind this too much, as if he could hear Crowley’s breaths, that meant that Crowley was still breathing, was still with him, but even so, he knew that this new development didn’t mean anything anything good. Aziraphale shifted slightly, so that he could look Crowley directly in the eye.

“Well, this isn’t too bad, all things considered,” said Aziraphale, as brightly as he could muster. “You could actually be called Gilbert, for one.”

Crowley actually laughed at that, but it turned into a cough halfway through, coating Crowley’s hands and mouth in a fresh layer of blood. He started to shiver in earnest now, and when Aziraphale reached over to feel his forehead, brushing back waves of lank dark hair as he did so, it was hot, and feverish. _Burning_. Aziraphale shuddered slightly at the thought.

“What— what do you reckon’ll happen when you get back Down Below?” asked Aziraphale, anxious. “Is it just— paperwork— or...”

“‘S... ‘s not good,” Crowley managed, pressing himself tighter against Aziraphale, who felt something like tears prick his eyes. _Why?_ He asked himself. Why was he so upset about this? Crowley wasn’t dying, really. He was being discorporated, something that had happened many times before, something that Aziraphale had been the direct cause of many times before. So why did this time feel so different? Because he was going to be alone for fifty years, give or take? Was he really that selfish. Or...

_I_ _t’s because my friend is in pain,_ Aziraphale realised. _He’s hurt, and he’s dying, and I can’t do a thing to make it stop._

Aziraphale looked over at Crowley’s unfamiliar face, those achingly familiar eyes, and then down at his hand— long, slender fingers, the nails and the flesh around them a deep, rotten black. Gently, trying not to jolt the tender-looking black areas, Aziraphale threaded his own fingers through Crowley’s, held his hand tight, searching the demon’s face for some sign that this was all right. Crowley stared back at him, yellow eyes glassy with fever or pain or something else, and ever so softly, squeezed back, let himself slump even further across Aziraphale.

Crowley murmured something unintelligible, and Aziraphale held onto him as tightly as he dared, their hands still firmly interlinked.

It was early evening when Crowley’s eyes finally fell closed, and Aziraphale knew they were close to the end now. He gazed up at the sky, watched how the orange of the sunset was swallowed up by the black of the night, watched as the stars finally, self-consciously came out, their delicate silver fire nothing like the gold one that burned in Crowley’s eyes, but still beautiful nevertheless. And Aziraphale marvelled at that, that for two years, millions upon millions of people had died, but that the sky was still beautiful.

That was ineffability for you, he supposed. All the things that people— angels, even— did in the name of religion, churches and temples and wars and crusades, all regarded with that same steely indifference. Those flagellants, who were going round now, repenting for their sins, the sick crack of hard leather on a ruined back, and God did not care. And people died. And died. And Aziraphale was just there to pick up all the pieces, and to tell Him that he was clever for it, because that was his _job_ , because he was an angel, because he still loved God, even if he hated Him sometimes, because he didn’t want to fall, because he didn’t _doubt_ , exactly, he just sometimes wondered if there mightn't have been another way to go about things.

Aziraphale didn’t notice which rattled breath was Crowley’s last, but he noticed when they’d stopped, and he sat in the darkness of the forest, with the empty shell of his best friend, and looked at the stars, and cried.

In the morning, Aziraphale carried Crowley’s body to the pit where all the other plague victims were unceremoniously tossed, and gently put him in. Then he went back to his little church, to Father Godfrey. He had work to do.

Had to fill up fifty years somehow.  
  
The plague died down in December, and Aziraphale breathed a sigh of relief.

It came back in 1361 with a vengeance, however, and Aziraphale was plunged back into misery and blood and death, the memory of his friend’s hand in his all that kept him from finding a nice, relatively painless method of discorporating himself until the whole mess was sorted. Because that was all he had to be, he told himself. Just a hand, in the darkness, just there to make them feel slightly less alone, to alleviate suffering, as best he could. And if he was counting the years, if everywhere he went, he was searching for a man (or usually man-shaped being, anyway) with yellow eyes, he kept this information to himself.

Ten years passed. Twenty. Aziraphale decided, abruptly, that he really didn’t care for the fourteenth century _at all_.

Fifty years went by, and there was still no sign of Crowley. Fifty-five, and Aziraphale began to grow concerned. Crowley would have come and found him when he got back, wouldn’t he? After all of... that. There were plague outbreaks every twenty years or so now, and although none, mercifully, had been as bad as that first one, Aziraphale still didn’t want to have to go through another one alone. Didn’t want Crowley to have to go through one alone, for that matter, not after last time. What if— what if Crowley was out there somewhere, alone, and looking for him? He was in France now, trying to sort of smooth some things over— the plague had claimed many lives, yes, but also made a profound difference on those it had left behind. Many were less willing to worship a god who would let so many die for no good reason, and Aziraphale found that he couldn’t exactly fault them for it, although of course he had to disagree on principle. It was all ineffable, he supposed. He found himself repeating that more and more lately, a mantra, as though he was trying to convince himself.

He missed Crowley. He missed being able to _talk_ about things like this.

Of course, he turned up eventually.

Aziraphale was at the battle of Agincourt— not fighting, you understand, but sort of keeping an eye on things, perhaps miracling an arrow out of the way here or there where he thought he could get away with it, when he caught an unmistakeable glimpse of a pair of slitted yellow eyes. Aziraphale let out a small squeak, and the arrow he’d been about to nudge sideways thudded into the chest of a French soldier with a wet scrape of metal against bone. The angel didn’t notice, was too busy scanning the carnage for another glimpse of those eyes.  After what felt like an eternity, he latched onto them again, closer this time, set into a pale, grimy face that curved into a small smile, and Aziraphale knew that Crowley had spotted him. The demon quickly made his way through the carnage, twisting and ducking swords and arrows in a way that shouldn’t _quite_ work with a limited human spinal cord, but did anyway. But then Crowley was _there_ , in front of him, blonde for once and skin a paler shade than Aziraphale had seen it in a few centuries. He was also remarkably short. But he was _real_ , and there, and as people fought and died around them, an angel and a demon hugged.

“Sixty-six years, Crowley,” said Aziraphale reproachfully, when they finally broke apart. Crowley shrugged guiltily, and looked up at Aziraphale with a sad sort of half-smile.

“I didn’t have much choice in the matter, angel. As you well know. ‘S good to be back, though.”

Aziraphale looked down at Crowley’s hands, already bitten, jagged nails worrying his nail beds, picking off flaky white patches of skin. He remembered other hands, other fingers, nails black and rotting, and his own fingers interlaced with them.

“It’s good to have you back, dear,” he replied, and gently reached for Crowley’s hand, wrapping it through with his own, feeling the unfamiliar shape of it, the familiar warmth that coursed through him as Crowley gently squeezed back.

There they stood, hand in hand, angel and demon, and watched as the battle raged on, as men fought and screamed and died. Crowley sighed.

“Well,” he said slowly, “at least it’s not the bloody fourteenth century anymore.”

**Author's Note:**

> there's actually no excuse for this i woke up yesterday and went "you know what would be fun? if Crowley caught the black death" and then i stayed up until 1am last night writing this so here we are
> 
> the title is from Exposure by Wilfred Owen, which has absolutely nothing to do with this, but like. it's a nice line.
> 
> a beautiful piece of music that definitely helped to inspire this: https://youtu.be/rZy6XilXDZQ (epilepsy warning as it does weird flashy things with the images)
> 
> merry christmas, i suppose!

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Destruction Follows in His Wake](https://archiveofourown.org/works/19665838) by [BookRookie12 (FanficCornerWriter19)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/FanficCornerWriter19/pseuds/BookRookie12)




End file.
